The Revelation Space Collection (289 page)

Thorn touched her hand gently, the gesture hidden in the shadows that hung between them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re not taking them back to Resurgam. But can we honestly say we’re taking them to a better place? What if all we’re doing is taking them to a different place to die?’

‘It’s a starship, Thorn.’

‘Yes, one which isn’t going anywhere in a hurry.’

‘Yet,’ she said.

‘I sincerely hope you’re right.’

‘Ilia made progress with the Captain,’ she said. ‘He began to come out of his shell. If she managed to persuade him to deploy the cache weapons, she can talk him into moving.’

He turned from the porthole, harsh shadows emphasising his face. ‘And then?’

‘Another system. It doesn’t matter which one. We’ll take our pick. Anything’s got to be better than staying here, hasn’t it?’

‘For a while, perhaps. But shouldn’t we at least investigate what Sylveste can do for us?’

She took her hand from his and said guardedly, ‘Sylveste? Are you serious?’

‘He took an interest in our affairs inside Roc. At the very least, something did. You recognised it as Sylveste, or a copy of his personality. And the object, whatever it was, returned to Hades.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘That we consider the unthinkable, Ana: seeking his help. You told me that the Hades matrix is older than the Inhibitors. It may be something stronger than them. That certainly appeared the case inside Roc. Shouldn’t we see what Sylveste has to say on the matter? He might not be able to help us directly, but he might have information we can use. He’s been in there for subjective aeons, and he’s had access to the archive of an entire starfaring culture.’

‘You don’t understand, Thorn. I thought I told you, but obviously it didn’t sink in. There’s no easy way into the Hades matrix.’

‘No, I remember that. But there
is
a way, even if it involves dying, isn’t there?’

‘There was another way, but there’s no guarantee it still works. Dying is the only way I know. And I’m not going there again, not in this life or the next.’

Thorn looked down, his face a mask that she found difficult to read. Was he disappointed or understanding? He had no idea what it had been like to fall towards Hades knowing that certain death awaited her. She had been resurrected once, after meeting Sylveste and Pascale, but there had been no promises that they would repeat the favour. The act itself had consumed a considerable fraction of the computational resources of the Hades object, and they - whoever were the agents that directed its endless calculations - might not sanction the same thing again. It was easy for Thorn; he had no idea what it had been like.

‘Thorn . . .’ she began.

But at that moment pink and blue light stammered across the side of his face.

Khouri frowned. ‘What was that?’

Thorn turned back towards space. ‘Lights. Flashing lights, like distant lightning. I’ve been watching them every time I walk past a porthole. They seem to lie near to the ecliptic plane, in the same half of the sky as the Inhibitor machine. They weren’t there when we left orbit. Whatever it is must have started in the last twelve hours. I don’t think it’s anything to do with the weapon itself.’

‘Then it must be our weapons,’ Khouri said. ‘Ilia must have started using them already.’

‘She said she’d give us a period of grace.’

It was true; Ilia Volyova had promised them that she would not deploy any of the cache weapons for thirty days, and that she would review her decision based on the success of the evacuation operation.

‘Something must have happened,’ Khouri said.

‘Or she lied,’ Thorn said quietly. In the shadows he took her hand again, and with one finger traced a line from her wrist to the conjunction of her middle and forefingers.

‘No. She wouldn’t have lied. Something’s happened, Thorn. There’s been a change of plan.’

It came out of the darkness two hours later. There was nothing that could be done to prevent some of the occupants of the transfer craft from seeing
Nostalgia for Infinity
from the outside, so all Khouri and Thorn could do was wait and hope that the reaction was not too extreme. Khouri had wanted to slide baffles across the portholes - the ship was of too old a design for the portholes to be simply sphinctered out of existence - but Thorn had warned her that she should do nothing that implied that the view was in any way odd or troublesome.

He whispered, ‘It may not be as bad as you expect. You know what a lighthugger’s meant to look like, and so the ship disturbs you because the Captain’s transformations have turned it into something monstrous. But most of the people we’re carrying were born on Resurgam. Most of them haven’t ever seen a starship, or even any images of what one should look like. They have a very vague idea based on the old records and the space operas they’ve been fed by Broadcasting House.
Nostalgia for Infinity
may strike them as a bit ... unusual ... but they won’t necessarily jump to the conclusion that she’s a plague ship.’

‘And when they get aboard?’ Khouri asked.

‘Now that might be a different story.’

Thorn, however, turned out to be more or less correct. The shocking excrescences and architectural flourishes of the ship’s mutated exterior looked pathological to Khouri, but she knew more about the plague than anyone on Resurgam. It turned out that relatively few of the passengers were as disturbed as she had expected. Most were prepared to accept that the flourishes of diseased design served some obscure military function. This, after all, was the ship that they believed had wiped out an entire surface colony. They had few preconceptions about what it should look like, other than that it was, by its very nature, evil.

‘They’re relieved that there’s a ship here at all,’ Thorn told her. ‘And most of them can’t get anywhere near a porthole anyway. They’re taking what they’re hearing with a large pinch of salt, or they just don’t care.’

‘How can they not care when they’ve thrown away their lives to come this far?’

‘They’re tired,’ Thorn told her. ‘Tired and past caring about anything except getting off this ship.’

The transfer craft executed a slow pass down the side of
Infinity’
s hull. Khouri had seen the approach enough times to view the prospect with only mild interest. But now something made her frown again.

‘That wasn’t there before,’ she said.

‘What?’

She kept her voice low and refrained from pointing. ‘That . . . scar. Do you see it?’

‘That thing? I can’t miss it.’

The scar was a meandering gash that wandered along the hull for several hundred metres. It appeared to be deep, very deep, in fact, gouging far into the ship, and it had every sign of being recent: the edges were sharp and there were no traces of any attempts at repair. Something squirmed in Khouri’s stomach.

‘It’s new,’ she said.

THIRTY-TWO

The transfer shuttle slid alongside the larger spacecraft, a single bubble drifting down the flank of a great scarred whale. Khouri and Thorn made their way to the rarely used flight deck, sealed the door behind them and then ordered some floodlights to be deployed. Fingers of light clawed along the hull, throwing the topology into exaggerated relief. The baroque transformations were queasily apparent - folds and whorls and acres of lizardlike scales - but there was no sign of any further damage.

‘Well?’ Thorn whispered. ‘What’s your assessment?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But one thing’s for sure. Normally we’d have heard from Ilia by now.’

Thorn nodded. ‘You think something catastrophic happened here, don’t you?’

‘We saw a battle, Thorn, or what looked like one. I can’t help jumping to conclusions.’

‘It was a long way off.’

‘You can be certain of that, can you?’

‘Fairly, yes. The flashes weren’t spread randomly around the sky. They were clustered, and they all lay close to the plane of the ecliptic. That means that whatever we saw was distant - tens of light-minutes, maybe even whole light-hours from here. If this ship was in the thick of it, we’d have seen a much larger spatial extent to the flashes.’

‘Good. You’ll excuse me if I don’t sound too relieved.’

‘The damage we’re seeing here can’t be related, Ana. If those flashes really were on the far side of the system, then the energy being unleashed was fearsome. This ship looks as if it took a hit of some kind, but it can’t have been a direct hit from the same weapons or there wouldn’t be a ship here.’

‘So it got hit by shrapnel or something.’

‘Not very likely . . .’

‘Thorn, something sure as fuck happened.’

There was a shiver of activity from the console displays. Neither of them had done anything. Khouri leaned over and queried the shuttle, biting her lip.

‘What is it?’ Thorn asked.

‘We’re being invited to dock,’ she told him. ‘Normal approach vector. It’s as if nothing unusual’s happened. But if that’s the case, why isn’t Ilia speaking to us?’

‘We’ve got two thousand people in our care. We’d better be sure we’re not walking into a trap.’

‘I do realise that.’ She skated a finger across the console, skipping through commands and queries, occasionally tapping a response into the system.

‘So what are you doing?’ Thorn asked.

‘Landing us. If the ship wanted to do something nasty, it’s had enough chances.’

Thorn pulled a face but offered no counter-argument. There was a tug of microgravity as the transfer shuttle inserted itself into the docking approach, moving under direct control of the larger ship. The hull loomed and then opened to reveal the docking bay. Khouri closed her eyes - the transfer shuttle only just appeared to fit through the aperture - but there was no collision, and then they were inside. The shuttle wheeled and then nudged itself into a berthing cradle. There was a tiny shove of thrust at the last moment, then a faint, faint tremor of contact. And then the console altered again, signifying that the shuttle had established umbilical linkage with the bay. Everything was absolutely normal.

‘I don’t like it,’ Khouri said. ‘It’s not like Ilia.’

‘She wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood the last time we met. Maybe she’s just having a very long sulk.’

‘Not her style,’ Khouri said, snapping her response and then immediately regretting it. ‘Something’s wrong. I just don’t know what.’

‘What about the passengers?’ he asked.

‘We keep ’em here until we know what’s going on. After fifteen hours, they can stand one or two more.’

‘They won’t like it.’

‘They’ll have to. One of your people can cook up an excuse, can’t they?’

‘I suppose one more lie at this point won’t make much difference, will it? I’ll think of something - an atmospheric pressure mismatch, maybe.’

‘That’ll do. It doesn’t have to be a show stopper. Just a plausible reason to keep them aboard for a few hours.’

Thorn went back to arrange matters with his aides. It would not be too difficult, Khouri thought: the majority of the passengers would not expect to be unloaded for several hours anyway, and so would not instantly realise anything was amiss. Provided word did not spread around the ship that no one was being let out, a riot could be held off for a while.

She waited for Thorn to return.

‘What now?’ he asked. ‘We can’t leave by the main airlock or people will get suspicious if we don’t come back.’

‘There’s a secondary lock here,’ Khouri said, nodding at an armoured door set in one wall of the flight deck. ‘I’ve requested a connecting tube to be fed across from the bay. We can get on and off the ship without anyone knowing we’re away.’

The tube clanged against the side of the hull. So far, the larger ship was being very obliging. Khouri and Thorn donned spacesuits from the emergency locker even though the indications were that the air in the connecting tube was normal in mix and pressure. They propelled themselves to the door, opened it and crammed into the chamber on the other side. The outer door opened almost immediately since there was no pressure imbalance to be adjusted.

Something waited in the tunnel.

Khouri flinched and sensed Thorn do likewise. Her soldiering years had given her a deep-seated dislike for robots. On Sky’s Edge a robot was often the last thing you saw. She had learned to suppress that phobia since moving in other cultures, but she still retained the capacity to be startled when she encountered one unexpectedly.

Yet the servitor was not one she recognised. It was human-shaped, but at the same time utterly non-human in form. It was largely hollow, a lacy scaffold of wire-thin joints and struts containing almost no solid parts. Alloyed mechanisms, whirring sensors and arterial feedlines hovered within the skeletal form. The servitor spanned the corridor with limbs outstretched, waiting for them.

‘This doesn’t look good,’ Khouri said.

‘Hello,’ the servitor said, barking at them with a crudely synthesised voice.